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The House is designed to reflect public opinion, and this can shift quickly — as we have seen throughout the past two centuries, and under Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama.

Future historians will trace the unwinding of Trump’s presidency back to a speech at Gettysburg on Oct. 22, in which the candidate made some very specific commitments (watch from the 16-minute mark in this video). Specifically, President-elect Trump faces three serious problems rooted in the way political realities — Republican control of Congress — will force him to govern.

First, Trump will not deliver on what he has promised because he can’t.

His first Gettysburg promise was to “propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress” — and there were great cheers in the crowd when he said this. Last Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said term limits will not happen (“We have term limits now; they’re called elections”). There is no way the president can force the Senate Majority Leader (or the Speaker of the House) to bring legislation to the floor. Check the Constitution on that.

The President of the United States, major news media, bloggers, bankers, stand-up comics, and people all around the world are shaking their heads and wondering what the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest is all about. Is it a display of leadership or anarchy, revolution or Sunday in the park? And the answer is, we just don’t know yet. This is a new form of drama that is just beginning to play itself out.

Many pundits argue that this is a leaderless protest. But this view of leadership is stuck in the old model of the single heroic leader in command and control mode. What we are witnessing is a different leadership model-distributed leadership. Here multiple leaders take on various leadership activities in an attempt to move toward the collective good. Read More »